Hitlers handymen....Schutzstaffel

---

This next entry is going to be sullen and serious.

Today we woke up bright and early and boarded our tour bus and made the 3 hour drive out to a small town called Mauthausen. It was a beautiful day, about 85 degrees, and not a cloud in site. The rolling hills of the area were filled with crops of all kinds. We approached the town and drove up a winding road in our bus and parked in a parking lot near the gates of Mauthausen. I saw the walls of the camp and they looked very old, but still in very good shape.

We walked around a bit and finally met up with our guide. He started by showing up where the Schutzstaffel (SS) barracks were located, and the administration offices of the camp. He told us that the camp was designed as a work camp to house 5000 inmates. But when the U.S. 11th Armored division found the camp on May 5th 1945 there was over 20,000 people located in the camp. Sickly and malnourished. Worked nearly to death, holding on to their lives barely.

We entered the camp compound through the main doors that had watch towers on either side. I could only imagine walking through these doors some 60 years ago, only under different circumstances. Directly to the right of the doors there was a wall with chain hooks, here newly arriving inmates would have to strip down to nothing and stand chained, facing the wall until there was more room made at the camp, sometimes for days. The way more room was made at the camp, was by people dying. It could be a hot day like today, or it could be cold in winter, didnt matter. After room was made for the new prisoners at the camp, they were taken into a shower room where hundreds of people were shoved into and bathed in boiling hot, or freezing cold showers. The SS said the showers were for "hygiene reasons." But really it was a way to weed out the week. That type of stress on a weak person would most likley kill them sooner or later. After the showers, the inmates were shaved of all their body hair, also for "hygien reasons." the razors that were used were often rusted and broken. And after an inmate was shaved a disinfectant solution was lathered all over them, and their head was dunked into a bucket to make sure that they were properly disinfected.

The camp was composed of many barracks that were designed to hole 300 inmates. The reality is that nearly 800 people were housed in a barrack. Each barrack was split into two sides, A and B. There were bunk beds stacked 2 or 3 high where sometimes 3 people would share one bed. Packed in like sardines, with feet and heads alternating. Our guide told us a story that if you wanted to survive the longest in the camp you should get a bed that is on top. Because when these people started starving to death sometimes they would get dysentery and not be able to control their bodies. So the waste would be left to the control of gravity.

Wake up time at the camp was 4:45 am. And then the inmates would have 30 minutes to eat, use the bathroom, washup, and make their bed. Each barrack only had 8 toilets. So if you would imagine 800 people trying to use 8 toilets in 30 minutes...you get the point. Some people would have to choose to either eat or use the bathroom daily. Because there were no breaks until 7:00pm which was the end of the work day. The workers would go to work in a nearby quarry harvesting building materials for the Nazi's to use. The workers had to carry stones on their backs that weighed nearly 100lbs at least 15 times a day up a steep and uneven path called the "Stairs of Death." These stairs were specifically designed to be steep and uneven, because the SS wanted them to trip and fall to their death. Also the SS would force inmates to push people off of the highest point, or just force themselves to jump while being held at gunpoint.

SS officers calculated the average weight for healthy male inmate while in the camp, and it came out to be around 100lbs. They also calculated that an average healthy man could last 9 months on minimal rations of food and harsh work each day. The camp was an assembly line of death. If you didnt die from starvation, you died from exhaustion. the main officer who ran Mauthausen had a vicious German Sheppard which he would sick on inmates of the camp if they did something wrong, and the dog would literally shred the frail beings til death. Another story was of a person who survived the camp, he was in the camp with his father, and one night he was awake, and he felt his father not moving. he prayed to God that his father was dead, not so he didnt have to suffer, but because he wanted the piece of bread that his father saved for breakfast each morning. The goal of the camp was to make people enemies of each other. For a son to want his father to be dead for a piece of bread is unimaginable in my eyes. But that was the goal of the camp. The anthem of the SS was "Destroy the body, Destroy the Soul, Destroy Life."

The next part of the tour our guide showed us was the refrigeration room. This room was used to store dead bodies until they could be burned. The refrigeration unit is still there and i saw it. In the next room was the original furnace used to cremate the bodies. Later several other furnaces were added. At its peak efficiency Mauthausen was able to kill and cremate about 150 people per furnace. So around 500 people a day. the SS would harvest gold teeth from people that were cremated and use them to fuel the Nazi war machine. In the earlier years of the war, when people were killed the SS would send letters to their family saying they died of natural causes, and that their ashes could be purchased for 200 Reichsmark, which was about equivilent to 600 Euro today.

Mathausen didnt originally have a gas chamber but one was added later. It was designed to look like a bathroom. They would stuff nearly 100 people into a very small area and dispurse Zyklon-B gas into the chamber which would suffocate the people inside. The corpses were removed by a special unit of inmates that also put the bodies into the furnace and cremated them all.

The camp killed anywhere from 150,000-300,000 people in the years it was open until 1945 when it was liberated. the camp was made for death through labor. The people at these camps were no different from me and you. Just normal people, one man was an Austrian Engineer who was brought to the camp because he refused to go to German and develope tanks for the Nazis to use. Others were put in the camp because of race, or religion, or sexual orientation, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or even if you had a different political belief. The only person who should be able to judge you should be God. Not man. These SS, these Nazis, this Hitler thought there was only one type of race. the Supreme race, the Aryan race. And for them to do a crime against humanity such as this holocaust is just unthinkable. and you really do not appreciate it unless you see it.

Sorry if this blog entry is a bit of a downer, i just had to share what i learned today. It was really quite disturbing, and disgusting, and emotional. I found myself staring at one of the furnaces for nearly 5 minutes straight not being able to look away, and having tears well up in my eyes. tears for the pain of those who had to died and those who suffered.

Thanks for reading

Auf Wiedersehen.

---